Giving an Account of Oneself. euphoria, will to life and circular view of an “eternal return” Talk About That in 5516 words and repetition of life. Nietzsche is seen as a character struggling with incoherence and enclosure, with the notion of primordial Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev impulse and of restituting “to the very act of thinking the virtue of resistance to any ‘conceptualization’.”3 The image of the forearms and hands in a holding position appears in the single- “I do not see it as a second world, it is part of ours.. channel video Happy Birthday!!! (2014),4 which starts with a I mainly make videos, using computer-generated technologies. still HD (high-definition) image of a stereotypically handsome They speak to the structure and to the way images are made man in the prime of his life, with the date 2016 written on his contemporaneously; about quite fundamental aspects of human forehead in a distorted script that both suggests a tattoo yet also experience of love, or death or sex or relations generally. clearly makes digital techniques manifest. I always had a problem with pointing a camera at someone, Happy Birthday!!! is such a trite expression, usually whereas generating an image in a computer, there’s no victim. spoken as a mere formality and with no thought about what The figures in the videos are surrogates, stand-ins for real people. lurks beneath the reference to our birth – our inexorable Because they’re not real, and it’s me that’s performing them, I feel mortality chronicled by the years of our life. The triteness of the I can do more to them, treat them worse. .. The CG world is a very words “happy birthday,” compared to the immense dimension inhospitable place. There’s pleasure in making them, but I’m not of life to which it refers, recalls a similar contrast in the 1971 a creature that lives in a cupboard. The videos are demanding, poem by Gilbert Sorrentino The Morning Roundup, which solicit and beg for recognition. I want people to be totally appears as an epigraph to this book, in the voiceover of the video immersed, not like in a cinema where you forget yourself, but in work Warm, Warm, Warm Spring Mouths, as well as in the live that way that you’re constantly reminded of yourself.”1 Ed Atkins performance Synonyms: One or Two Noise-making Rifts, in which Atkins rehearses the poem and its impossible, recuperative The book you hold in your hands is an artist’s book, in so attempt over and over again: far as the bulk of its pages have been constructed by the artist as a collage of imagery, text and graphic elements, gleaned from I don’t want to hear any news on the radio the worlds of his video works from the last four years and their about the weather on the weekend. Talk about that. source material. You will find, for example, an image of the Barberini Faun, the Hellenistic marble sculpture of a drunken Once upon a time and sleeping satyr in the Glyptothek in Munich. For centuries a couple of people were alive after it had been found in a ditch in Rome, the sculpture was in who were friends of mine. the collection of the Barberini family. After numerous attempts to acquire it over the years, Ludwig of Bavaria finally bought it The weathers, the weathers they lived in! in 1814 and it was sent to Germany five years later. The reclining Christ, the sun on those Saturdays.5 figure, his legs wide open, unabashedly sexual, exhibits a chipped off, flaccid penis, and still today inspires marvel at an In the mad and histrionic collage of references to dates oxymoronic paradox: how could something so carefully and that make up Happy Birthday!!!, those of his father (1950–2009) intentionally crafted, so coldly marble and still, represent a come up, as do other dates much less connectable to Atkins’ real state of being so uncertain and unconscious – whether sleeping, life, like 1872. The work refers to memory time and to moments drunk, or possibly even dead? Atkins’ own contemporary in time and their repetition, to the loss of those moments, to version of the Barberini Faun, carefully crafted into three the pain in that loss, and to the ways in which we say goodbye variations, is the desperately lonely character in Ribbons (2014), to people over and over again as we internalize them, to the on view in this exhibition today, a digital surrogate who drinks way that an embrace of another person could be an embrace himself to sleep in bars in search of love, yet finds only holes in of ourselves. The flow of images that make up the video is the wall through which to stuff his nose or fingers or dick.2 accompanied by Atkins’ own voice speaking a first-person Another image that comes up in this book shows a pair narrative about a now that is eternally returning: “Every Sunday, of forearms and hands in a holding position, as if supporting every Sunday in 1951.. it’s 1872.. I remember, I remember .. an invisible soccer ball or cradling someone’s head in one’s lap. this time next year.” This image actually refers to an erotic and murderous drawing Now is the Fall of 2016, and the book you hold was made by Pierre Klossowski of a young man suffocating an invalid titled over the last six months on the occasion of Atkins’ exhibition at Suprême vision de frère Damien. Klossowski’s essay on Friedrich Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea and Fondazione Nietzsche is included in Atkins’ reading list published on page Sandretto Re Rebaudengo. Now is one year after the artist’s 236 of this book. This reading list, although not an “artwork” in double presentation of his video Hisser on two floors of a run- the standard sense, forms part of our exhibition. We purchased down wooden building that had until recently been a hospice all the books he recommended for the library of the Castello di for the sick. Located on Büyükada Island on the Bosphorus, Rivoli, and there they will remain, gathered together according an island where subjects were exiled from antiquity, the house to the “provenance principle” of archives, for future readers had originally belonged to a Greek family – a community who and passers-by to come. In his long essay, Klossowski gives an had lived in the area for thousands of years, but who, like the artist’s account of Nietzsche’s intensity, depression, Dionysiac Armenians, were brutally exiled from Turkey in the first part of Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev Giving an Account of Oneself. Talk About That in 5516 words 13 the twentieth century. The video was inspired by a true story of Now is nineteen years after 1997, a date inscribed like Atkins who grew up on the cusp of when computers became that led to the catastrophes of the mid-century. Atkins recalls a man in Florida who died in his sleep when his house slid into a a digital tattoo on the forehead of the character in Happy ubiquitous, could the “upper regions” be nothing other than so- one of the founders of collage, the German Dada artist Hannah sinkhole. In twenty minutes, it describes a series of vignettes in Birthday!!!. When asked by email what 1997 refers to, since called RL – real, corporeal life? And could the “art of conducting Höch (1889–1978); the way in which she picked up scissors the final stages of the male character’s life at night in his bedroom, for me it was an important year (the year I saw Catherine oneself in the lower regions” be the ethics and modalities by and cut up magazines and reconfigured their fragments to prior to an earthquake and a sinkhole that swallows him and David’s documenta in Kassel), Atkins answered simply, “1997 is which we choose to act – or not to act in the virtual realm, as carefully craft the material “badly” was a violent political act of the entire room up into a final ecstatic release (death? orgasm?) much more about a feeling. Not history, not present, just 1997. a conscious engagement with it in the light of enhancing the opposition and resistance; it was conscious – what Atkins would represented as an abstract dive into water. At first dreaming and Something lyrically ambivalent there.. ” Lyrically ambivalent flourishing of embodied life on our planet? call “reflexive” – literally a cutting-edge art. then awake and sleepless, he looks at Rorschach stains, then – that is, unstable, uncertain, in a time out of time, or in a time There used to be a website, www.edatkins.co.uk, but I In a contemporary equivalent mode to picking up those masturbates to the postcard of Walter Sickert’s painting Ennui that repeats cyclically over and over again, potentially joining cannot find it anymore. When I click on it, the web tells me the magazines, Atkins purchased a CG (Computer Generated) model (1914) and another of the Barberini Faun. This is the quietest the simplicity of experience and profoundness of knowledge; site has expired or the hosting has been removed. Talk about of a male character from the Turbosquid.com website that sells and most narrative of Atkins’ recent works and, except for the a feeling of something in-between, not quite proper history, that. Once upon a time films were made of celluloid and there stock 3D models and texture maps used in computer graphics by billowing of curtains in the wind, nothing much seems to happen like 1872, but no longer in the present here and now of 2016.